Visual Studio Blog

The official source of product insight from the Visual Studio Engineering Team

Introducing Bing Code Search for C#

Download the extension now from the Visual Studio Gallery Update: For the folks who have extensions that replace the Visual Studio IntelliSense experience, you can still access the feature using 'ALT-A' as a shortcut or assign the 'Tools.LaunchSnippetSearch' command to a shortcut of your choosing (under Tools->Options->Environment->...

Auto History Extension in Visual Studio 2013

Have you ever found yourself wishing you could roll back a few hours to a piece of code you had working but have made changes to? You were “in the flow” and you haven’t checked anything in to your source control system (or perhaps weren’t using source code control on your project)? We are pleased to announce the ...

Visually Creating Snippets

Get the new Snippetizer DevLabs Extension here Snippets are a fun and easy way to quickly add code into your app. Snippets are commonly used, small blocks of code that represent a particular action or pattern that developers find useful, ranging from simple try-finally or if-else to entire classes or methods. To insert a code snippets you ...

Update for Extension Authors: VSIX Manifest Version Range Attribute

In Visual Studio 2010 we introduced a new deployment model for extensions, the VSIX format. This format is based on the Open Packaging Conventions and enables extension developers to create a single package that can be easily installed by Visual Studio and contain all the appropriate files to describe the extension. For Visual Studio 2012 we ...

Introducing the Microsoft “Roslyn” CTP

Today we are releasing the first Community Technology Preview of the Roslyn Project! What is Roslyn? In the past, our compilers have acted as black boxes – you put source text in and out the other end comes an assembly. All of that rich knowledge and information that the compiler produces is thrown away and unavailable for anyone else to ...

Quick Find extension in the Productivity Power Tools

We’re pleased to announce a new Quick Find (Ctrl+F) extension in the February release of the Productivity Power Tools.  This is the first version of the Quick Find extension and we are planning to make some improvements to it in future Power Tools releases, but this blog post describes the reasons for the extension, its functionality, where...

Color Printing Extension Now Available!

We are pleased to announce the availability of Color Printing as a free extension for Visual Studio 2010!  By default, VS 2010 prints only in black and white; this extension restores support for printing code in color. Installation and Setup Installing Color Printing requires Visual Studio 2010 Pro, Premium, or Ultimate (the Express ...

Emacs Emulation Extension Now Available!

We are pleased to announce the availability of Emacs Emulation as a free extension for Visual Studio 2010!  This extension provides basic support for Emacs keybindings and text editing commands, very similar to the built-in Emacs keyboard layout in VS 2008.  Once the extension is installed you should be able to use familiar keyboard ...

15 minute blog post: PNG files in Packages

Recently I’ve been helping plan the next version of Visual Studio. It’s way too early to be talking about specifics, but one topic came up this week that I have to share. Package Authoring As some of you may have noticed, many of the regular posters here have been busy writing extensions for the Visual Studio Gallery, some of which ...